Our world is saturated with information–to the point where many young adults may find themselves stuck in a perpetual state of paralysis, afraid to make mistakes or take risks. Whether it’s losing weight, navigating a tricky relationship, deciding on a career, or figuring out the next steps after college–a life coach is your new best friend with executive functioning benefits a-plenty.
What Is Life Coaching?
What does your young adult want to accomplish? Whatever it is, a life coach can help your young adults explore solutions to school, work, relationships, or self-esteem challenges. If your young adult is feeling stuck, an experienced life coach can help a young adult gain momentum and face persistent or larger-than-life obstacles with confidence.
You may be wondering what the difference is between life coaching and therapy. Both can help young adults improve themselves; however, they have different aims and approaches.
Life coaching helps young adults achieve personal and professional goals. They can also function as a mentor by helping your young adult identify their strengths, overcome weaknesses and fears, and change their behaviors. They can also help clients address emotional challenges, such as anxiety, loss of direction, and low self-esteem.
That said, life coaches aren’t trained mental health professionals–they can’t diagnose or treat mental health conditions like a trained professional therapist. Professional therapists mainly focus on emotional healing. They listen, model healthy communication skills, and help their clients eliminate undesirable behavior or thoughts.
Benefits Of Life Coaching For Young Adults
Life Coaching helps young people become more self-confident, motivated, and live a more purpose-driven life. Life coaches like to ask questions. It may surprise you that life coaches do not necessarily provide guidance or “life hacks” to overcome obstacles. Instead, life coaches empower young adults to make decisions for themselves based on their own goals and strengths. Question-led exploration leads to profound and often longer-lasting change.
You can expect personal improvement in the following areas as your young adult works with their life coach:
- Greater Emotional Awareness–Self-awareness is crucial for personal growth and goal achievement. A life coach can help uncover strengths and weaknesses. During this process, you become more aware of limiting thoughts or beliefs that may be holding you back.
- Improved Ability to Set and Achieve Goals–Through coaching, your young adult will gain a better understanding of who they are, identify top skills and talents, and set goals to achieve a purpose-driven life. A life coach can assist you in identifying obstacles or barriers that might be preventing you from achieving your goals while guiding you through the goal-setting process. They can also help you develop time management skills–research shows that these are essential if you want to make and keep goals.
- Effectively Manage Stress and Anxiety–Life coaches can encourage positive habits and provide accountability for those deep-seated emotional fears that can keep you from building positive momentum. Stress and anxiety often come from poor time management and troubling thoughts about the future–your life coach can help you develop effective time management skills, identify triggers, and introduce relaxation, mindfulness, and meditation techniques to help quell anxiety and manage stress.
- Increased Confidence and Purpose–Life coaches help you make better decisions by talking through challenges, identifying thoughts that hold you back, and working through possible solutions. As you work with your life coach, you will find that you trust yourself to make decisions and can move more easily towards your goals with positive intent. Often, self-esteem naturally improves as you work towards goals and overcome challenges.
Building And Developing Essential Life Skills
Developing essential life skills is perhaps one of the most impactful benefits that your young adult will enjoy as they work with a life coach. Life skills like time management, financial literacy, effective communication, and goal-oriented decision-making all play a crucial role in helping your young adult transition into adulthood. These skills are the precursors to a lifetime of success on all levels of life, be it personal, emotional, or social.
Dominating The Transition To Adulthood
No one can argue that transitioning to adulthood is one of the most crucial transitions of your child’s lifetime. How they manage this transition can put them firmly on the path to success, and working with a life coach can help you do just that.
If you’re curious what this might look like in real life, consider these two scenarios:
Scenario #1
Emily is a 21-year-old university student majoring in Psychology. She is in her third year of college but feels uncertain about her future career path. She struggles with time management and feels overwhelmed by her academic workload, which is affecting her grades and overall motivation. Emily is passionate about mental health and counseling, but she also has an interest in research, and this uncertainty is making it difficult to commit to one career over the other. She feels stuck, so she decides to meet with a life coach. During her first session, Emily expresses her desire to achieve a high GPA, gain practical experience in her field, and explore both clinical and research-oriented careers.
During subsequent sessions, Emily’s life coach helped her create a study schedule, curated study techniques that work best for her and helped her prioritize daily tasks. Her life coach also encouraged Emily to interview both research and clinical professionals in the field. Emily also set a goal to complete two informational interviews in both career areas and to secure an internship by the end of the summer with a career professional she liked best. She also agreed to check in regularly with her life coach to provide accountability, track progress, and adjust strategy if needed.
By the end of the semester, Emily had improved her GPA significantly and felt more confident in managing her coursework. She completed two informational interviews and secured an internship at a local mental health clinic. Emily also began preparing for graduate school applications with a clearer understanding of her career path and academic goals.
Scenario #2
Jason is a 22-year-old recent college graduate with a degree in Computer Science. Despite graduating with honors, Jason feels anxious about entering the job market. He has a strong interest in software development but is unsure about what niche would work best for him. He also wants to continue his education with certifications but is overwhelmed by the choices available. Jason decided to meet with a life coach to help him identify a career direction, determine what certification he needs, and develop a strategy for job searching.
To help Jason narrow down his choices, his life coach suggested Jason undergo a self-assessment exercise to uncover Jason’s strengths, interests, and values (Jason’s life coach knew that research supported self assessment as a means to improve performance.). Based on the self-assessment results, Jason decided which niches in software development were best suited to his strengths, interests, and values. He chose to focus on web development due to his passion for creating user-friendly applications. Once Jason had determined a career direction, he was more able to determine what certifications he would need to enhance his job applications. Jason made a goal to earn at least one certification a month over the next 6 months.
Within six months, Jason had obtained a certification in web development and significantly improved his technical skills. He successfully landed a job as a junior web developer at a tech company.
Life Coaching for Young Adults: Live Life By Design
Octagon Mentoring is a customized coaching and mentoring program designed specifically for today’s youth. It’s tough out there, and the technical and social challenges our youth face as they embark on the transition to adulthood are endless.
Octagon’s Mentoring was purposefully built to help young adults face and dominate today’s challenges. By focusing on the critical life skill development of process, mind, body, purpose, relationships, finance, career, and culture, Octagon Mentoring can help your child set goals, overcome obstacles, and gain increased confidence in personal talents and abilities.
If your child is struggling or stuck, we can help! Reach out to one of our consulting specialists today to schedule a FREE consultation.
